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Padawanline Anniversary I: The First Year

Today is a very exciting day for the blog, as it has been ONE YEAR since Padawanline came into being!! It seriously feels just like yesterday… any chance you guys would like to hear the story of the blog’s origins? Great! Let’s see…NOTE: Contains spoilers from Episode III and the TCW episode The Wrong Jedi
It was early-ish 2013, and there was a lot going on in the world of Star Wars. Season 5 had just passed and we were all wondering when those new episodes would arrive, it hadn’t been long since the news that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm and the arrival of Episode VII, and I myself had just gotten ahold of the TCW Season 2 DVD and the hardback copies of Paul and Hollace Davids’ Jedi Prince series. So Star Wars was pretty much on my mind all the time, and I realized that I needed some place to talk about it to anyone who would listen… a blog. I did some looking around for a blogging site that would work best, and WordPress proved to be that. Then I had the challenge of figuring out the blog’s title and my own username. My username came a lot quicker; I thought it’d be really cool to be named after a SW ship of some variety, and I admit I almost called myself Falcon, but I figured someone else probably already had taken that one, so I chose Twilight, after Anakin’s earlier ship in TCW, on account it was both a cool ship and that the name was somewhat feminine, so readers would assume I was a girl without me having to repeat myself. Haha, I’m aware that Anakin probably didn’t consider it a feminine name at the time… 🙂 But yeah, with the username out of the way, I needed a blog name, and that is quite a story in itself, in fact, its origins began in the earliest days of 2011…
The original name was “Star[Wars]Struck”, I kid you not. I thought it was a clever way of describing my love of SW, but the more I thought about it, it was sorta long and convoluted. But then another name came to mind: Padawanline, a meshing of “Padawan” and “online”. Flashback to February 2011, I was growing in the SW fandom, mostly just in coming to re-love the Originals, and since reading one of my brother’s SW Insiders, I was both completely wowed by all the things I learned and perplexed by just how big the SW Galaxy really was and all I didn’t understand. At this time, I hadn’t yet seen any of the Prequels, had seen probably less than fifteen episodes of TCW series, and even then was more familiar with the Clone Wars microseries (as my brother had DVDs of those recently as well), but the one thing they all shared was that I only vaguely understood them. But yet, after reading that particular Insider, I started imagining funny SW stories, like I still do today, including one I dubbed “Padawanline”.
Part of the reason I hadn’t watched TCW recently at that time was that a part of me feared, as we were already in the thick of Season 3, that something bad could happen to Ahsoka. Ahsoka had been an easy character to love, back when TCW debuted and I watched only a few episodes, I grew to like her pretty quickly because she was a little like me in the sense that she was just a girl in the thick of a war she didn’t fully understand, just as I didn’t fully understand The Prequels and related stuff. Seeing the Clone Wars from Padawan Tano’s point of view helped me understand it better, even when I still was like “Wait… I’m confused…” about the politics or something. And I might not’ve really known it was called Order 66, but I knew that a lot of good Jedi didn’t make it out of Episode III. So I started theorizing that perhaps Ahsoka evaded the whole thing somehow (not knowing that she would ultimately leave the Jedi Order anyway) and placed her in her mid-thirties working an office job on Tatooine, her Jedi past unknown, accidentally meeting Luke Skywalker through Facebook and ultimately joining the Rebel Alliance. With it came a drawing of Ahsoka in a very Earth-esque cubicle working on a “Windus 7” PC with a togruta-variant smiley “Have a nice day!” coffee mug. The drawing was pretty awful at the time because I had no reference of her and certainly didn’t know we’d ever see what she might look like as an adult, so I’m not posting it here (though a redo drawing might happen someday 😀 ). And with what I know about SW now, it seems almost too silly to work. However, I still have this little hope that Ahsoka might be fighting in the Battle of Endor as a Rebel… at least, that’s my theory, however she might’ve gotten there, social media or otherwise 🙂 When I recalled the title, I realized it worked even better than I would’ve thought; “Padawanline” would clarify that this blog is for everyone, not just the people who understand everything about the SW Galaxy, but for those who are like me and are always learning new things about it! The conversation would be light and fun and hopefully not cause headaches of confusion, it would be positive and love all things SW, it would not filled with an excess of confusing or weird headcanons, it would be the SW blog I myself would want to read! And I can only hope that I have achieved that in this past year. So, on April 21, 2013, I started putting the site together, and the first blog was published on April 23rd!
This past year has been an exploratory year for Padawanline, I’ve learned a lot about blogging and my writing abilities, it’s helped me dig in deeper into the SW Galaxy, and while it’s not the most popular SW blog ever, it’s done very well and I’m very proud of it. And with its expansion on Tumblr, it’s done better than I could’ve imagined just writing my first short introductory blog that April evening! With 28 blogs under our belt, who knows what will come for this blog in the next year? This truly is an exciting time to be in the SW fandom, and being able to blog about these things as they happen is amazing to me! So thank you so much to all readers, followers (WP and Tumblr), and well, everyone who’s enjoyed Padawanline! Thanks for taking the time to read my random ramblings and actually enjoy them!
So as I continue putting together blogs (like on The Lost Missions and Star Wars Day), I’m glad you’re all here to join me on this exciting journey of blogging and learning more about this wonderful world of Star Wars.